mer US President Donald Trump paved a path to the presidency in 2016 by calling for a “big, beautiful wall” along the United States border with Mexico.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES).- His 2024 rivals in the Republican primary election, scrapping for every advantage against him, looked north.
Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, has frequently told voters that it’s not just the southern border that needs stepped-up enforcement — “it’s the northern border, too.”
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“I think we do whatever it takes to keep people out,” she told reporters Saturday when asked if her comments meant she supported building a wall. “If that’s what it takes to keep them out, we will do a wall, we will do any sort of border patrol that we need to have.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ended his bid and endorsed Trump on Sunday after battling with Haley for second place behind the former president, had recently suggested building a wall along some trouble spots of the U.S.-Canada frontier. Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur, dropped out of the race last week, but not before trekking up to Pittsburg, New Hampshire, a tiny town that sits just below the jagged, 5,500-mile line that divides the United States and Canada, with a camera crew in tow. He later drew criticism from Canadian journalists and pundits when he proclaimed that the United States should not just build one wall, but two.
In Pittsburg, where residents Beverly Martin, 79, and Chip Jones, 74, sat at the bar in an eclectic, barnlike restaurant on a recent snowy afternoon, the idea of a border wall along New Hampshire’s northernmost boundary, an isolated, forested region, was anathema.
“Then you have this armed national army that can be used against you and your rights,” Jones, a Republican and retired fire chief from Massachusetts who winters in the town, said in an interview at Full Send Bar and Grill off Route 3. He paused, mulling it over: “A border wall in Pittsburg — does it just not feel right?”
“It doesn’t,” replied Martin, who is also a Republican and taught home economics for 18 years at the Pittsburg School down the road. “A lot of people in Pittsburg have relatives on either side of the border, and people from the border towns in Canada come here to work.”
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